MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service

describe new technologies. Of course, these dreams have never quite come about as planned. Instead of a smart machine seeking out music tuned to my tastes, I still have only a small number of choices on my radio dial. And ever since Napster started filtering, sharing music on the Internet has become increasingly difficult. One thing that underlies these ideas is their dependency on metadata, or data about data. Metadata provides information about artists, song titles, and so on. All that information is attached to the music, but isn't part of it. The music world suffers from a lack of standardization in terms of metadata formats, as well as a paucity of public metadata. The MusicBrainz project hopes to change this situation. It's a large database of music metadata, and even though it's only in beta testing right now, it already contains over 300,000 tracks. MusicBrainz information is all user-contributed, providing what some have termed the " cornucopia of the commons. " 2 Unlike many situations, where each user decreases the value of the shared space (the so-called " tragedy of the commons " 3), the easy duplication of electronic information creates a situation where each user makes the system more valuable. For example, when you purchase a new CD and insert it into your computer, your audio player will probably come up with a generic name for it, Audio CD 47 perhaps, complete with " Track 1, " " Track 2, " and so on. Were you to use MusicBrainz, the audio player would have attempted to connect to the MusicBrainz server, to see if that CD's metadata were available. If it were, your player would have renamed the CD (Amnesiac) and the tracks (" Pyramid Song " and so on). If metadata were not available, you likely would have filled in the track names yourself, if only for your own benefit. Your player would then ask you if you wanted to share the information; if you did, it would send the information to MusicBrainz to share with other users. This type of functionality is currently implemented in an audio player called FreeAmp, and MusicBrainz plugins hopefully will be released for other players soon. MusicBrainz origins MusicBrainz wasn't the first to implement this idea. was created using a similar system. It grew incredibly fast, with its users contributing track and title infomation for 800 new CDs each day. However, …